Clipping a drawing-any suggestions

[mike mcneil]

I have situation where I need to clip out a section of a drawing to be sent to a consultant.

The file must be in AutoCAD DWG format.

I need to send them only a portion of the drawing. Ideally I would like to use a DLVP to essentially trim out the rest of the drawing, but that the results in all the drawing information being included in the DWG file when exported with only the area that is in the DVLP showing up as a clipped/cropped portion of the drawing, meaning if you delete the clipping/cropping frame in AutoCAD you can get the whole drawing.

As a last resort, I could copy the drawing and then trim and erase the unneeded portions, but I would think there is some other way to do this.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[Guest Frank Brault]

Hi Mike,

There are no security features that I know of that would prevent your consultant from viewing the portion hidden by a Vectorworks crop if he/she wanted to. You could export a pdf of the sheet and that could be displayed in AutoCAD. or you could copy the drawing and then trim and erase the unneeded portions as you said.

hth,

[billtheia]

Can you convert the cropped DLVP to lines and send that?

[mike mcneil]

No that only deletes the cropping frame, thus revealing the rest of the drawing. It looks like best thing to do is copy everything and delete and trim out what is not needed.

Thanks for the input.

[VincentCuclair]

This is a bit round-about but a solution at least....

Create SLVP with the crop you want, convert the SLVP to lines, copy and paste to an empty Design Layer and enlarge up to the correct scale, convert to dwg, done!

Edited April 22, 2009 by Vincent C

[mike m oz]

What we really need is the ability to export a WYSIWYG 2D Autocad DWG file from a Sheet Layer.

[VincentCuclair]

Yup and a clip and copy tool...

[Pat Stanford]

Check out this link for a description of how to export a SLVP back to a design layer in scale:

AEC Bytes - Viewport to Design Layer

[VincentCuclair]

I guess in this case the easiest is to temporarily change the DL scale to 1:1 when creating the SLVP......and skip the whole scaling problem

[mike mcneil]

I second mike m oz on the WYSWIG for sheet layers to DWG.

I am well aware you can do this with section viewports, but for some reason it isn't working for my drawing information in plan for a plain old vanilla SLVPs. The 'convert to lines' command only converts the cropping frame of the SLVP to lines, thus only giving me a rectangle and and none of the information contained within the SLVP. If I try the 'convert to polyline' command. It gives me the lines as polygons but I loose all hatches, text, etc. Not to mention that you get duplicates from the conversion of the 3D information into flat 2D polygons from the walls.

[islandmon]

Try export to DWG#1... then import DWG#1 into a new VW file > clip & trim & scale, as req'd.

Then Export the revised DWG#2

[billtheia]

What we really need is the ability to export a WYSIWYG 2D Autocad DWG file from a Sheet Layer.

AGREED!

We really need to be able to easily and reliably export to DWG without workarounds or clean-up.

I've posted a similar wish here:

http://techboard.vectorworks.net/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=102403&Searchpage=2&Main=21961&Words=%2Bexport+%2Bdwg+%2Blines&Search=true#Post102403